Is native quantitative thought concretized in linguistically privileged ways? A look at the global picture

ABSTRACT

This work investigates whether reference in speech to certain quantities, namely 1, 2, and 3, is privileged linguistically due to our brain’s native quantitative capacities. It is suggested that these small quantities are not privileged in specific ways suggested in the literature. The case that morphology privileges these quantities, apart from 1, is difficult to maintain in light of the cross-linguistic data surveyed. The grammatical expression of 2 is explained without appealing to innate quantitative reasoning and the grammatical expression of 3 is not truly characteristic of speech once language relatedness is considered. The case that 1, 2, and 3 are each privileged lexically is also difficult to maintain in the face of the global linguistic data. While native neurobiological architecture biases humans towards recognizing small quantities in precise ways, these biases do not yield clear patterns in numerical language worldwide.

KEYWORDS:

• Numerical
• quantitative
• typology
• language
• numbers

Acknowledgements

This paper resulted indirectly from “Linguistic Diversity Meets the Brain: Future Directions in the Language Sciences”, a conference held at the University of Zürich in May 2017. I would like to thank the organizers of the conference for hosting such a stimulating confluence of perspectives: Damián Blasi, Sebastian Sauppe, Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel, and Martin Meyer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, CE, upon reasonable request.